Netflix Is Down Due To AWS Outage [Updated]

By Gene Ryan Briones on 12/25/2012

If you’re experiencing problems lately with Netflix, then you are not alone. Some customers are reporting that Netflix is down as early as 1 PM PT yesterday. Thankfully, Netflix has acknowledged the problem on Twitter saying, “We’re sorry for the Christmas Eve outage. Terrible timing! Engineers are working on it now.” Netflix Cloud Architect Adrian Cockroft also confirmed the issue on Twitter saying that the service is working on some devices, albeit some are affected.

Cockroft also pointed out that the service interruption is due to Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancers or ELBs, which automatically distributes incoming application traffic, and that they are still waiting for Amazon Web Services to fix it. Amazon was also quick to respond. A few hours later, Amazon reported that some of its Elastic Load Balancers were indeed down. As of this writing, Amazon is saying that its engineers are “in the process of recovering the service.” Apparently Netflix isn’t the only service affected by the AWS outage, Roku and DramaFever also confirmed that their services were also affected.

Update: Netflix has confirmed on Twitter that the outage is over. “Special thanks to our awesome members for being patient. We’re back to normal streaming levels. We hope everyone has a great holiday,” it said.